


Masquerade

by deliverusfromsburb



Series: Tuesjade Prompts [12]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, brief cameos by Sollux and Hal, who is contemplating a truly horrific Halloween costume
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-31
Updated: 2017-12-31
Packaged: 2019-02-25 22:51:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13222893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deliverusfromsburb/pseuds/deliverusfromsburb
Summary: tuesjade prompt: Halloween





	Masquerade

**Author's Note:**

> It's New Year's Eve and I'm posting old Halloween-themed fanfic. So that's what my life is like.

You've been exploring for a few weeks, and when you come back, the house's decor has changed. The leaves of the trees nearby have turned vivid colors. There are bright orange gourds set out on the front porch which, after you sample one, don't taste particularly good. There's also a cartoonish skeleton dangling from a hook on the front door. You give it a friendly nod as you walk inside.

Jade is the only one in the living room. "You're back!" she says. "Did you find anything interesting out there?"

"It's all interesting," you say. "Not as interesting as here right now, though. What's going on? Are we displaying one of our kills to intimidate the neighborhood? I thought we were taking a more conciliatory stance."

"Oh no." Jade sniffs the air. "Did Jaspers leave something dead outside again?"

"No, I meant the skeleton."

"Oh." She laughs. "It's for Halloween. That isn't until the end of the month, but we've started early. There was a lot of debate over that addition, actually. Some people thought it might be tasteless. But since it's the first time a lot of us have celebrated, we're going all out. You should see all the tacky shirts we've found at the store.” She taps her chest, which is currently emblazoned with the slogan, “Witch, please.”

Now you remember. Halloween is one of those seasonal human holidays. You've heard it mentioned before, but either it hadn't come up again or you'd been out in space when it had. If it involves decorating things with skeletons, you're all for it, although the gourds you could live without. "What is this tradition about, anyway?"

"I'm not sure I'm the best person to ask. I've never celebrated it myself. It's hard to trick or treat when you're living alone. But in general... it's a chance to get spooky!" She giggles. "And more importantly to dress up and eat yourself sick."

"A lot of your holidays seem to involve eating yourself sick," you observe.

"America is a culture of excess," she says, deadpan. "That is Rose's official position on the matter."

"What's yours?"

She purses her lips for a moment and then nods. "I'm new here, but I think it's kind of fun. I'm going to be Marie Curie. Roxy is going as Ada Lovelace, we will be classy and educational."

You frown, left behind. "Wait, you're going to *be* someone?"

"That's part of the point! Well, you don't actually _be_ them." These clarifications are important. You've learned, in your attempts to communicate cross-species, never to assume understanding. "But you dress up and pretend to be someone else! That's part of Halloween, being in disguise. I think it goes back to trying to scare ghosts away by being scarier? But now it's just for fun. Younger kids go around asking for candy, it's called trick or treating."

Scaring away ghosts is a strategy you'd never considered. You'd tried to help, although as a young troll your abilities had been limited. Instead, you'd practiced being polite and sympathetic. The few times you could make things right (putting a warning sign up by a patch of crumbling cliff, retrieving a favorite token for a grieving moirail) even more spirits had crowded around you, desperate for aid or just someone to talk to. Had humans felt similar pressure, to make a whole tradition based on frightening the dead away?

"We have something similar," you explain. "Normally it's a cullable offense to present yourself as another caste, but we have one day when it's encouraged. You can try to move up a few rungs and claim special privileges for a while. Of course, if your disguise isn't good enough and a highblood notices, they’ll still punish you, probably fatally. I guess that's our version of tricks or treats."

"It's not that high stakes here." Jade frowns. "Is every holiday from your planet that messed up?"

"More or less. At least then the disguises had a point.” You settle onto the back of the couch. Maybe you’re weightless off-planet, but it’s nice to sit down. “You do something similar, when you're younger. I'm not sure I understand why you'd keep doing it. Is the purpose to get away from yourself?”

Jade shrugs. “I guess some people might want to escape being them for a while. But I like science, and Marie Curie made some important discoveries, even though I'm glad I won't get radiation poisoning. Looking back it's probably a good thing I went God Tier, otherwise all that uranium wouldn't have been good for me."

"I would be dead young myself," you say cheerfully. Jade's eyebrows draw together, and you guess you've misjudged your response, or your tone. That happens a lot. "Thanks for explaining this to me," you say, to move the conversation along. "It sounds interesting."

"Sure. Do you have anything you'd like to dress up as? I bet Alternia must have had some neat intellectuals, although most people would say that's a boring idea." Jade plucks at the fabric of her sleeve. "Mostly I just think it'll be easy to get a lab coat."

You touch your own shirt protectively. "I'm not so sure about that part. I'm happy as myself."

“Whatever suits you.” She picks up her phone. “I’ll let everyone know you’re here. Welcome back!”

 

Apparently you didn't miss all the Halloween prep, because a few days later everyone makes a trip to the Halloween store. (Almost everyone. Calliope and Kanaya insist on making their outfits by hand and split off to the fabric store instead.) The building is noisy and filled with distractions: plastic skulls that laugh when you press a button, enormous coffins that swing open and closed. It seems like humans save up all their gruesome and grisly impulses and unleash them at once. No wonder the holiday has begun slipping outside its proper temporal bounds. One day isn’t nearly enough.

Everywhere, of course, are costumes. Jade is trying on a pair of fake wolf ears as a joke when Hal shows up with a silvery outfit in a package. You're nearby examining a bust with curled horns a lot like yours, so you overhear. "Check it out," he says. "Sexy robot. Do you think this would make Dirk regret we were born?"

"Halloween is an opportunity to dress up as something you want." Jade returns the ears to the shelf. "Do you want to waste that chance annoying Dirk?"

Hal scowls. He'll give you two the time of day as honorary members of the once prototyped and/or formerly robots club, but Jade has a tendency to not put up with his excesses. It's hard for him to carry on when she starts using her reproving voice. "I admit I'm not feeling the robo-tits," he says. "But the skirt ain't bad. Not like I can wear an outfit with pants."

"As someone who was a sexy robot for a while out of necessity, I'd vote against it," you say.

"Hmmm." He turns the package over in his hands. "I've got it, what about a Minion?"

Jade brightens. "Oh, those cute yellow guys from Despicable Me? I only ever saw the ads, the world ended before the movie came out. They looked nice, though."

Hal tosses the package back onto a nearby shelf. "That's right, you were spared before their reign of marketing terror began. Only Dirk and Roxy would comprehend the full scale of my costume’s horror. Maybe I'll split the difference, go as a sexy Minion."

Jade rolls her eyes. "How about you go tell Dave the animatronic raven over there isn’t alive and he should stop trying to intimidate it?”

He retreats, and Jade wanders off. Before you move on, you reach out and slide the sexy robot costume far back on the shelf, where no one will see it.

 

"I'm surprised you didn't come back with three bags of junk from that Halloween store," Sollux says. You've brought some food up for him, since he didn't come down for group dinner again, involved in some sort of project or Internet discussion. He’s accumulated a cult following online, even if he hasn’t made as many inroads as you here. That's not so different than before - back on Alternia he told you and the rest of his long-distance friends that most of his neighbors wanted to kill him. "It's stupid, but it sounds like the kind of intercultural thing you'd be into. No offense.”

"None taken. I do appreciate the more relaxed attitude toward the morbid. I think hangups like those are counterproductive. That part doesn't bother me." You bite into one of the rolls you brought up for him, and he grumbles and snatches the plate away. "It's the costumes I'm not sure about."

"Hell, you ran around dressed as Troll Indiana Jones half the time anyway," he says, through a mouthful of crumbs. "I don't think it's any different."

"I don't know. Maybe." You're not sure why it feels different now. Only that there's an aversion in you bone deep to pretending you're something you're not. "I'll think about it."

And you do.

Here is what it is to be a Maid: you are made. Grown in a society where you are told what you are and who to be, propaganda pushed from every angle. Reduced to a shade by a vengeful former friend with whatever feelings that were yours buried under the demands of the summoned dead. Game knowledge pumped into your mind accompanied by the reminders that you are meant to play a role and do what the game asks of you. Your soul bound in circuitry with programming trying to guide your affections until you tore yourself apart. You'd betrayed friends and doomed timelines and watched a thousand copies of yourself get destroyed by a vengeful demon because you had to. So when you rose, transcendent, from a cracked disc of stone, you were done. No one else would tell you who to be. Especially not some human tradition fixated on hiding what you’ve worked so long to bring to the surface.

 

The next time you pass through the common room, Calliope has taken it over with a sewing machine and newspaper patterns spread all over the floor. "Hello!" she says when she sees you, narrowly avoiding swallowing a pin. "Would you mind holding this flat for me?"

You hold two pieces of fabric steady while she guides them through the sewing machine. Several other brightly colored pieces have already been stitched together and piled up. "What are you making?"

"Jake and I are going as superheroes. I suppose we already are that, in a manner of speaking, but we're dressing as our characters from that comic we've made. If this silly hood will sew up right," she adds, when the sewing machine jams.

"Do you think they're better than you?" you ask as she wrestles with it.

She frowns, spitting out a pin onto the table. "What?"

"I don't understand why everyone is excited to pretend to be something else. Aren't you happy with being you?"

"Oh, I see where you're coming from." She pops open the top of the sewing machine and starts extricating a tangled mess of thread. "You know, I used to dress up all the time because I hated the way I looked. I wished I could be a troll, because I thought you were lovely, and I envied you the lives you led."

"You envied us?"

"I had a romanticized notion, to be sure, but anything was better than being chained to a wall." She yanks, and the thread snaps out. "I envied that you weren't alone."

"And you're not anymore."

"I'm not! Everyone has seen my face, and it no longer seems quite so monstrous. I'm not hiding it. That's not what this is all about. It's about... well, I guess it's almost about showing yourself off."

You glance at the sketch she's working from. "That neckline does look a little low."

"Oh, there's going to be a fabric insert, not that I have anything to flaunt. What I meant is, it's a chance to highlight something about yourself. What you like, what you care about. Something you created. It's not self-deprecation, it's self-expression." She flicks the machine on again. "Luckily in my case the skills are transferrable. Now, mind helping me with this last seam?"

You do, and she adds the component to the pile. It’s hard to tell how they’ll go together to form the outfit she’s sketched as a guide. It’s clear she’s put a lot of care into it, though. "I appreciate you trying to explain.”

"Happy to be of help. We're all learning about this world together." She smiles, an expression full of teeth, and you don’t know why she ever would’ve wanted to hide it.

 

You never participated in the one day on Alternia when lowbloods went in disguise. It didn't seem worth the risk, and you had no desire to take your turn at bossing people around. You remember the atmosphere though, anticipation shot through with dread, people pretending to grasp at what they could never have. The wanting gave them away more than sloppy costuming. Those born into higher castes took it as their due.

The mood here is different. People mill around laughing and talking, running down the halls adjusting wigs or asking someone to zip them up. The doorbell rings over and over, and Jane's father has stationed himself there with a bowl of candy and an obligatory pair of disguise spectacles. Everyone is... happy. Even Sollux has emerged, dressed in what looks like formal wear and still using his husktop, which he's balanced atop a platter. "What are you doing?" you ask.

"I'm a web server," he says drily. "This is what happens when you don't volunteer any ideas."

"I thought you thought this was stupid."

"It is, but everyone else is doing it, and I got bored." He snickers. "You should see what KK got talked into. Bet it itches."

You take a look around but don't see Karkat. You do see Calliope in her finished outfit, beaming as Kanaya compliments her on her stitching.

"You're the odd one out, AA," Sollux says.

You roll your eyes and dash off.

 

Jade is already in her lab coat costume. "Hey," she says when you approach. "How a-"

"I know it's last minute," you interrupt, "but can you find me a hat?"

"A hat?"

"The kind troll Indiana Jones wears." You shape the outline of its brim on your head. "A fedora, I think it's called."

"I don't think we have any in the house." She bites her lip and then snaps her fingers. "It's too late to go out and buy one. We'll borrow one for the night, but try not to damage it, ok?"

The hat appears in a flash of green, and you grab it out of the air. It'll sit awkwardly over your horns, but that's ok.

"So you've decided to do a costume after all, huh?"

"I used to do this one all the time." You have a jacket that'll work, and of course your whip is always on hand. "I misunderstood before. I thought it was about hiding yourself, but I get it now. It’s a day when you can put things in plain sight, if you want to."

“That’s a nice way of putting it.” She reaches out and settles the hat evenly on your head, businesslike. “We’re going to see if anyone’s willing to give a bunch of teenagers free handouts. See you downstairs in five?”

“I’ll be there,” you say, and race upstairs.

 

Here is what it is to be a Maid: you make yourself. The world throws everything it has at you, and you hold fast to the bright core that is you across deaths and rebirths, prototypings and ascensions. Nepeta might call it your Heart. It flares and fades as the world twists you out of shape, and in the end you reach in and reform yourself into a reflection of who you’ve become. Once you’ve done that, no one can take it away.

You pull on your jacket and look out the window. There are already people streaming through the streets, a whole mess of brightly colored figures that reminds you of your bubble days. Unlike the bubbles, though, you can tell even from here that they’re happy.  Their smiles give it away. A bunch of people wearing their Hearts on their sleeves, setting out for a night of adventure in a brand new world. You can’t wait to join them.


End file.
